As it did last election, the Canadian Federation of Students’ Ontario caucus has released a “report card,” grading the province’s three major political parties based on their education policies. While the majority of politically aware students won’t be surprised to find the NDP receiving top marks, eyebrows may go up at seeing the Progressive Conservative party outshine the Liberals.
Dave Scrivener, VP external at the University of Toronto Students’ Union, said that he hopes the report card will cause the major parties to reconsider their education platform before the Oct. 10 election.
CFS has a reputation for aligning with the NDP on a wide range of issues, especially regarding postsecondary education policy. The NDP won high marks for promising lower tuition and higher provincial funding to universities.
Asked whether CFS-O considered these promises likely to be kept, David Molenhuif, the national executive representative for CFS-Ontario, replied:
“[Students have] seen broken promises from all three of the big parties in Ontario…nevertheless, if a party’s willing to commit to something, the expectation is that they will fulfill that promise.”
“Should they not…it’s up to the voters,” he added.
A widely circulated CFS-Ontario press release (it’s even posted on Facebook) draws attention to certain “highlights” of the report. It bashes the Libs for “unapologetic support for higher tuition fees and illegal ancillary fees.”
CFS-Ontario gave the PC party an A- in “system design.”
Molenhuif explained that this criterion was based on a party’s stance on the education system’s structure—primarily on how to handle the transfer of credits between schools. CFS-Ontario gave the PCs a high mark here to praise the Conservatives’ promises to streamline the credit transfer system.
The Ontario Conservative platform calls the province’s system of transferring credits “unacceptable” and cites the systems in British Columbia, California, Australia and the European Union as examples for Ontario to emulate.
Molenhuif added that the system design category reflects CFS-Ontario’s campaign against the perception that a degree from a more expensive school was more “valuable.”
“You can get a better education at Lakehead than McGill,” he said, explaining that CFS-Ontario wanted political parties to recognize student-to-faculty ratio as a key indicator of a university’s quality.
The report was compiled using data from two sources for each party: that party’s platform, and their answers to a CFS-Ontario questionnaire. Representative questions from that questionnaire included “Do you agree that education is a right for every willing and qualified student?” The education questionnaire also asked candidates if they support a $10 minimum wage.
